by Delia Rosen
“All right, Lydia,” I said. “I’ll stop.” Without taking my eyes from the woman, I reached behind me and turned the doorknob. “But we’re done here. For good.”
Lydia looked away, then down. “You asked me a question a moment ago.”
“Forget it. I don’t care to hear the answer.”
“You must,” she said. Then she looked at me. “I mean, I wish you would.”
My upper and lower teeth met in a bite that could have gone through my mother’s holiday dishes.
“I came here for one reason,” Lydia said. “I came here for Stacie. She desperately needs your help.”
Oh, that was rich, I thought. Here I was, ready to crack up, but someone needed my help. Yet I have to admit, the woman’s admission did tweak my curiosity.
How totally, utterly, tragically sad that gal must be.
Chapter 11
Lydia added her daughter’s name and number to the piece of paper, then left. I looked at it, wanting to crumble it and toss it in the trash. I just pushed it aside.
Stacie Leah. I wondered if the girl’s mother had given her my father’s name. My guess was not. From the sound of things, down here twenty years ago, Katz wouldn’t exactly have opened a world of opportunity. Even if folks weren’t neo-Nazis or racists, there was no reason to give the few and the twisted a homing beacon.
Lydia was gone, but I stayed where I was. I didn’t want to talk to Thom, not then—and apparently, she was just as happy to avoid me. It occurred to me that I’d worked so closely with Thom day after day after day and yet these two big, fat parts of her life with the Katz family had remained hidden. It made me wonder what else I didn’t know—not just about her but about everyone. For all I knew, Grant could be a cross-dresser like J. Edgar Hoover. Robert could be gay. Dani could spell Beethoven.
I sat and thought. Surprisingly, not about Lydia or Stacie or my father. That whole thing made me sick to my very soul. No, I did what any soul-weary deli owner would do in my place: I Googled Joe Silvio.
A couple of articles later I discovered that this guy was everything Lydia had said and more. She had actually left out the best part, which she probably didn’t know and which would have been nice for Grant to share with me: The guy had a police record. Petty larceny. Stole a couple of computers from an overnight delivery service where he was a driver. That was how he met his future wife. Brenda’s father hired him on some sort of work-release program. I guess they felt the worst they had to lose was a couple of loaves of bread.
A guy steals one computer because he needs it, I thought. If he steals a couple, it’s in order to fence them. I wondered if Joe still had some of his old larcenous contacts. Maybe he had robbed places he delivered to or had cased them. Maybe he’d been trying to get out of the business and someone hadn’t wanted him to.
Not that I should have been worrying about that, Joe, his death, or anything other than the blessings that were already on my table. After a half hour I turned my attention back to what I really should be dealing with—first and foremost, an employee with whom I clearly needed to spend just a little more face time today.
Déjà vu. Once again I inclined my head into the small hallway leading from the main deli area to my office.
“Hey, Thom?”
“Just a sec.” She was just making change for A.J.
“No, now, Thom,” I said pleasantly.
“I said—”
“I heard you,” I said in a singsong voice. “But I really need to hear about the half sister you never told me I had.”
There were gasps. I heard them, like little sobs at a funeral. Thomasina stubbornly finished what she was doing. I could see she was not going to be cowed, unlike A.J. and Dani and Newt, all of whom had obviously just pieced together the scenario and seemed about a head shorter than they were the last time I saw them. Maybe because they were ducking down a little in case I threw something.
Thomasina called Raylene over to work the cash register until she came back. She walked over briskly, looking down, not from fear or embarrassment but more like a bull about to gore a torero.
She came in, and I shut the door behind her. She stood where Lydia had stood, with the same proud defiance.
“So?” I said.
“So,” she replied. “We’re moving on from hate crimes?”
“Don’t mix meat and milk,” I said. “You raised my half sister. And never told me.”
“Did you want to know?”
“Ef, no.”
“Okay. Then we’re done here.”
“I don’t think we are,” I said.
“No? What do you want to say?”
“How about, ‘You could’ve told me!’?”
“Why? You’re mad at your father. I knew you would be. You feel bad for your mom. I knew you would be that, too. You would’ve hated your . . . whatever the heck Lydia is. I don’t even think there’s an official name for that.”
“Slut. Whore. Jezebel.”
“Well, I figured that out, as well. You wouldn’t have liked the girl, your half sister, even if she whizzed gold.”
Thom was obviously worked up herself. For her, referring to any lower-body function was the equivalent of using a four-letter word.
“You might have given me the benefit of the doubt,” I said.
“Honey, it just wasn’t my place.”
“Well, the catfight’s out of the bag now,” I said. “Spill.”
Thomasina stood there, defiant.
“What?” I asked.
“You don’t talk to me like that,” she said. “I don’t deserve it.”
Until she said that, I hadn’t realized how tense my shoulders still were. She was right, though. It was everyone else, not her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Tell me about it. Please.”
Her face softened. “Gwen, what I did I did for your uncle Murray. He was in agony over this. Lydia? She ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog sniffin’ for leftovers. She was always miffed that your daddy wouldn’t marry her. I think some of that contributed to her giving Stacie to me. I think she did it to hurt your daddy.”
“How did that hurt him?”
“It moved her to his brother’s circle. It was kinda like a chess move, I always thought. I move the queen here, and you have to move me to you to get her back.”
“But she was living with him, she said.”
“Except when you came to visit. Or he just didn’t feel like having her around.”
“So he didn’t love her?”
“Oh, he did in his way. But he loved your mother more, too. And he loved himself more than that. I know that sounds harsh, but he really wanted to be by himself, doing his thing. I once heard him say to Murray, ‘I didn’t leave a good woman to take a bad one.’”
“Did Lydia have a reputation?”
“She was a bit of a wild mare then, she was. At least, that’s what folks who knew her said when they saw her here.”
“Lydia made it sound like they were so in love. And they were having fun.”
“They were! Too much fun to be bothered with a child, however much Lydia went back and forth on that. Some days she wanted a family. Some days she wanted to party. Your uncle and I—we thought it best to just take care of Stacie ourselves. And your father agreed. He had wanted Lydia to put the baby up for adoption, but she wouldn’t hear of it. The girl became a kind of lifeline when your father wasn’t available. Partly a little dress-up toy, as if Lydia was five years old, and partly a piece of your dad.”
“Sounds like a real healthy setup.”
“You understand it perfectly.”
No longer angry, I looked at Thomasina for support. As usual. At least that balance had been restored to the universe.
“When was the last time you saw Stacie?” I asked.
“Oh, lawsy . . . When your dad passed, she moved back with her mother, and I only saw her occasionally.”
“So you don’t know anything about her?”
“A little. Mo
stly that she did not pick up where her mother left off,” Thom said.
“I don’t follow.”
“I heard she joined one of the Belmondo Church missions in Okinawa, Japan, when she turned eighteen. That was about five years ago. I lost track of her for a while, but now she is back in town.”
“That figures.”
“What does?”
“Another string from a pushpin to Joe Silvio.”
Thom made a confused face. I told her to never mind. I looked past Thom at the number on my desk. It was local.
“Well, Stacie may have traveled the world for Jesus, but now she’s back,” I said. “The question is, what do I do?”
“What do you want to do?” Thom asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said.
“In your heart.”
I was breathing heavily, looking inside, not liking what I was seeing. “I need to think about that,” I said.
“That’s fair, child. This has been a whole lot of hot soup, and poured with a ladle.”
Into a bowl that was already full, I thought. I screamed inside at the thought of seeing a face that looked like a mash up of my father and that awful woman. Awful to me, anyway. And apparently to Thomasina. And maybe, I wondered, to Stacie, as well. Could be we had that much in common.
“I’ve got to get back to work,” Thom said. “We’ve got the Reid thing tonight, and there’s still a crowd of thrill seekers. At least they’re ordering.”
“Always a silver lining, right?”
“If you look for it.”
I smirked. “Where’s the good in this mess?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” She shrugged her big shoulders. “Maybe you’ll need to talk to Stacie to find that.”
A good woman, and wise. I impulsively threw my arms around her. “Thank you, Thom.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Oh, and one thing more. It’s important.”
“Yes, hon?”
I stepped back and asked, “Did you happen to see my cell phone?”
Thom seemed relieved to have to deal with something mundane. She said she did not.
I turned toward the kitchen. “Has anyone seen my phone?” I yelled, but I was talked out and my voice carried only as far as the counter. The staff heard, though; so did a customer who worked for a moving company.
“Yeah,” he said. “I got it right here in my pants.”
“Great!” I shouted. “It’s set on vibrate! Enjoy!”
He made a disgusting jerking motion on the stool with his hips. Okay, sometimes Southern neighborliness crossed the line. That’s why the term redneck was invented.
A.J. walked over. “I ain’t seen your phone, but there was that police guy came looking for you while you were in with Thom.”
“What police guy?”
“The one Grant told to back off.”
I didn’t ask how she knew what Grant had said behind my closed office door.
“What did he want?”
“To talk to you.”
“Did he leave a message?”
“Nope.”
“Fine.” I didn’t give a crap about Officer McCoy. If he wanted to talk to me, he could get a subpoena.
“But then someone else came in.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Never saw him.”
“Name?”
“He didn’t give it.”
“What did he want?”
“Didn’t say.” She reached into her apron and pulled out a business-size envelope. “But he left this.”
“Where? On a table?”
“No. He handed it to Dani.”
“Did he have anything to say to her?” I took the envelope, ran my fingers along it. No powder inside. Wasn’t trying to anthrax me. It occurred to me that I had double the chances of being killed down here than most people: whoever killed the bread man and whoever liked the bread man and thought I killed him.
“I asked her that very question. He said, ‘Please give this to Ms. Katz.’”
“So he knew my name.”
“Apparently. He used it.”
“Did Dani say anything else?”
“She said she had seen him before.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“When?” This was getting exhausting. I wished A.J. would just anticipate my questions and answer them all at once.
“She saw him the day the bread guy was killed. And the next day, too.”
“Was he one of the onlookers?”
“He didn’t seem to be, Dani said. See? I did ask relevant questions.”
“I appreciate it.”
“But you know how Dani is—not the most observant chick in the henhouse. She said the man came in to eat. She remembered him because she had to show him where the bathroom was.”
Squinting with the confusion of trivia overload, I slit the envelope. Didn’t get a paper cut, which would have been fitting. There was a scrap of paper inside. It had been torn from a yellow legal pad. There was handwriting. Four words in blocky, childish script. They made me want to throw up.
“What’s it say?” A.J. asked as she tried to peer over the angled document.
I folded it lengthwise. “A.J., would you get Dani over here?”
“Sure thing. Why?”
“Just . . . please.” I said it quietly because I didn’t have the strength to shriek the request an octave above high C.
A.J. caught Dani’s eye and motioned her over. She arrived, maneuvering deftly through stuck-out chair backs, holding dirty plates. Pretty well balanced for a newbie, I thought again. I was also slightly pleased that the deli boss part of my mind was acting independently of my exhausted, barely functioning regular brain. That meant I could literally lose my marbles and still run this place. That was good to know.
“Dani, the man who gave you this note, where was he when you had to show him where the bathroom is?”
“Back there.” She jerked a thumb toward my office.
“Swell,” I said.
“Why?”
“Nothing,” I told her. “Just curious.”
“Oh,” A.J. said. “I get it. Your phone.”
“My phone,” I said under my breath. “What did he look like?”
“Just a guy,” Dani said. “Young. Black hair. Cute. A little like that host on Channel Five news.”
“Bill Roche?”
“That’s him.”
“Dani, was it him?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. He was too short.”
I didn’t bother explaining that it’s tough to tell someone’s height when they’re sitting behind a desk on TV, but there was no point. I walked back to the office and shut the door quietly, because, again, I didn’t have the energy to slam, kick, and punch it. Then I dropped the note on my desk and fell into my chair. It complained creakily.
“Don’t talk to me,” I told the old piece of furniture. “Especially if my dad and that succubus ever used you.”
It squeaked.
My elders back in New York—my mother, my tantes, their canasta-playing friends, some of the senior execs at the firm—all of them had told me that there are times in life when you truly feel like you’ve hit a wall. Not when you’re young, when you just feel tired. When you’re older and you just run out of gas. Literally. Your face feels numb and you drop where you’re standing and you don’t move again until, like they did with tired horses in the Wild West—according to that Burt Lancaster movie I saw, anyway—they literally light a fire under your belly to get you back on your feet.
Well, this guy had done that. This man who had obviously cased the place for reasons of his own and had gone into my office, pretending to look for the bathroom. He had just lit a fire under my belly with his hastily scrawled note.
It said:
Call your cell phone.
Chapter 12
There was no procrastination. None needed, none given. I picked up the office phone
and called my cell number.
“Hello?” the gruff voice on the other end said.
“Hello,” I replied. “This is Gwen Katz. The woman whose cell phone you stole.”
“I’m sorry about that,” the caller said. “I’m sorry it was necessary.”
I didn’t detect a Southern accent, but then the voice sounded muffled.
“Are you talking through a handkerchief?” I asked.
“Does that matter?”
“I guess not. Just answer one question. Are you Bill Roche?”
“Who?”
“The Channel Five anchor.”
“No,” he replied.
“Okay. Then what are you? Who are you?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “That’s why I took your phone.”
“Oh,” I said. “Got it.” God bless caller ID. Makes for a lot of needless cloak-and-dagger. “So why am I calling? Why was it necessary to take my phone, and—just as important—do you plan to give it back? Oh, and do you have a dog?”
The voice on the other end fell silent for a long moment.
“A dog?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Good. Sorry. I guess that was a lot to throw at a common thief.”
“I’m not that,” he protested.
“No? Convince me.”
“I’ll try to, if you’ll let me talk.”
That was fair. It occurred to me that this was about more than a guy going into my office and taking my phone, which was pretty wrong. It was also about me being mad at my father and transferring that to this guy. “I’ll shut up,” I told him.
He took a breath. I could hear it amplified by the handkerchief. “I need your help.”
“Why me?”
“Because I followed her to you.”
“Who?” Christ, it was another game of Sixty Questions.
“Lydia.”
Hell’s silver bells. I had known that woman for a half hour, and I was already thoroughly sick of her. “What’s she to you?”
“Personally, nothing. But she’s Stacie’s mother,” he said.
Another woman I didn’t want to hear about. I was hoping this wasn’t another ghost of Papa’s past. God, I thought, I was just kidding about Kwanzaa . . . I swear.
“I’m listening,” I said. “What about Stacie?”